Life on the Bottom Shelf

Posted 1 October, 2007 in Writing Life |

Stephen King’s experience editing the 2007 edition of Best American Short Stories leads him to write a thoughtful New York Times Book Review essay about the current state of the American short story. In taking the pulse of the short story today, King finds that there are still stories being written, but the audience for them is dwindling.

This is not news (although it does frequently surprise me that in our current attention-deficit culture the shorter form is not embraced more wholeheartedly). Nor is King’s assessment of one key reason for this state of affairs, notwithstanding the fact that very few commentators are courageous enough to point it out publicly.

The largest market for new short stories is literary journals, which are confined to the bottom shelf of the magazine rack at big box stores such as Barnes & Noble, or Indigo here in Canada. This in itself is a problem, since browsers are not likely to scour the bottom shelf of the magazine rack for the new issue of Grain or Fiddlehead, preferring, as King points out, the more accessible mainstream publications at eye level. (Of these, the titles not devoted to cover profiles of Britney Spears’s latest travails or the speculations about J-Lo’s tummy bump largely don’t feature fiction; Harper’s and The New Yorker are exceptions, and the Atlantic now publishes short fiction only once a year, in its summer issue.)

But that’s not the whole problem; what’s significant is what King sees as the net result of consignment to the bottom shelf. King goes on to point out that much of the fiction that appears in the smaller journals is written in a kind of echo chamber, with MFA-laden writers scouring the pages of stories written by other MFAs to find out what sells, then crafting more of the same. These stories feature a kind of creative-writing-school-induced mustiness that might appeal to writers who have emerged from the cocoon-like embrace of a writing workshop where they learned about “the 5 essential elements of dynamic story structure” or “the 3 secrets of building powerful, unforgettable characters.”* But it’s by no means clear that they will appeal to anybody else. Why? Solipsism is rarely appealing to anybody other than the solipsist. As Virginia Woolf said in different circumstances, “life escapes.”

King puts it this way in his essay:

Last year, I read scores of stories that felt … not quite dead on the page, I won’t go that far, but airless, somehow, and self-referring. These stories felt show-offy rather than entertaining, self-important rather than interesting, guarded and self-conscious rather than gloriously open, and worst of all, written for editors and teachers rather than for readers.

And that seems about right to me. Where I would respectfully differ from King’s analysis is in the reason for this kind of story dominating literary journals. King feels that the bottom shelf is to blame. If the organs that publish short fiction are placed out of the easy access of a mass audience, King argues, the only people willing to hunt for them will be those with a vested interest in what they offer: specifically, other writers, who will then begin to reflect in their own writing the same kinds of things they read in the journals. Thus, the echo chamber.

However, there may be a kind of chicken-and-egg effect here. Perhaps the journals’ consignment to the bottom shelf has as much to do with the kinds of stories that get published in them — that is, the “airless,” “show-offy,” and “self-important” kind that King bemoans — as with the dwindling audience. In other words, perhaps King has it backwards. Perhaps it’s not the placement of the journals and the consequent dwindling audience that resulted in the echo chamber. Perhaps it’s the echo chamber that resulted in the dwindling audience and the consequent consignment to the bottom shelf.

This being the case, there is a relatively simple approach that might have some positive effect in luring people back to the short form: stop writing for the echo chamber and start writing for readers. This would not result in an automatic 180-degree reversal of the short story’s fortunes, but it would be a good start. So long as the stories that get accepted for publication in journals continue to feature a parade of empty formalism and pale, self-satisfied navel gazing, the vibrancy that infused the great stories of the past — think Poe, think Faulkner, think Hemingway, think O’Connor, think Cheever — is likely to remain absent, as is the audience for the short form.

*In case you think I’m making these up, I’m not: they are part of what you can learn at what’s being billed as “Writer’s Boot Camp,” a two-day seminar offered by the Toronto Writers’ Centre.

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